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Building a game engine with jQuery

About the Talk

April 25, 2010 11:30 AM

There's a multitude of professional game engines out there for consoles, PCs, and mobile handhelds. However, there's one big empty gap, even in 2010: Not a single game engine targets desktop and mobile browsers natively without the use of plugins.

In this session, you will learn about the challenges of building a pure browser-based gaming engine, how web programming concepts like event-driven architecture need to be considered, and what it means to fully utilize the open web stack—HTML5, client- and server-side JavaScript, External Stylesheets, and, of course, Canvas—to squeeze every millisecond of rendering time. Obviously we'll use the help of jQuery, since it already has many powerful built-in features. We'll take apart modules of our own upcoming Aves Engine for isometric real-time games and give you a very solid idea of what needs to be done to build graphically rich, real-time, full featured games for the web.

You'll learn what needs to be done to create a browser based game engine with the aid of jQuery and its powerful event and plugin model—starting from important concepts like event-driven architecture, and focussing on all of the technology you'll need: HTML5, Canvas, Stylesheets, server-side non-blocking JavaScript with node.js, and a lot more.

If you're interested in porting your games or developing new games that run within the browser, this is your session. You should have minimum knowledge of web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript to follow every concept.